mac osx - Cannot get ZFS pool created in OSX to import on Linux system

I'm experimenting with different file systems for use between a dual-booting Linux/OSX laptop which will act as a testing platform. Despite being a BSD variant, I've had a lot of trouble finding a compatible file system but have settled on the implementation by OpenZFS.

The latest OpenZFS 0.6.3-1 is installed on both systems. I initially created a pool from within OSX using /dev/disk0s6. Everything works fine in OSX with the drive mounting and being writable:

$ zpool status
  pool: Data
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:


    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    Data        ONLINE       0     0     0
      disk0s6   ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

$ zpool import
   pool: Data
     id: 16636970642933363897

  state: ONLINE
 action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier.
 config:

    Data        ONLINE
      disk0s6   ONLINE

But when I export the zpool and reboot into Linux, I cannot import the pool, even with -f:

$ zpool import -f Data
cannot import 'Data': one or more devices are already in use

$ zpool import
   pool: Data
     id: 16636970642933363897
  state: UNAVAIL
 status: One or more devices contains corrupted data.
 action: The pool cannot be imported due to damaged devices or data.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-5E

 config:

    Data                                         UNAVAIL  insufficient replicas
      ata-Corsair_Force_GT_135004090FF015790001  UNAVAIL

Rebooting into OSX shows that the pool is not corrupt and loads just fine.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer

After a lot of troubleshooting with some great people over at the OpenZFS GitHub, I can confirm that this is a bug.

The real problem is that I created the pool using the last partition of the disk which, on Linux, can be confused as corruption if the partition aligns closely enough with the end of the disk.

ZFS creates four labels on the target device for redundancy with two at the beginning and two at the end. When ZFS evaluates the disk after booting into Linux it will encounter /dev/sda first which will provide a partial match against the last two labels at the end of the disk (from the last partition). It then erroneously believes that the device is corrupt as there are no labels at the start of the disk.

The solution was to add a buffer of at least 10MB of free space at the end of the disk.

Full details can be found here:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/2742